The great stage races have many stories. Today’s start town, Castrovillari, lies in the Pollino National Park, Italy’s largest and the home of Europe’s oldest tree, a Heldreich’s pine thought to be 1,230 years old. Crossing the park is the River Coscile, known to its Greek Achaean settlers in the 8th century BC as the Sybaris. They gave the same name to the town they founded overlooking the Gulf of Taranto, about which ancient historians wrote unlikely tales: that townsfold wore haute couture, sated themselves at banquets paid for by the state, and devoted themselves to sexual pleasure. From them we derive the word “sybarite.” The finish town, Matera, one of the world’s oldest continuous settlements, along with Aleppo and Jericho, was forgotten until Pier Paolo Pasolini chose to shoot The Gospel according to Saint Matthew there in 1964. Many years later, the actor who played Jesus, Enrique Irazoqui, remembered the townfolk asking him if he could perform a miracle, and getting angry when they saw him with a cigarette, “because Jesus didn’t smoke.”
“I said, ‘I am not Christ. I am an actor who is portraying Christ.’ … They didn’t understand: the difference between an actor and the part he portrays did not exist for them.”
